4 Ways Agora Increases Field Productivity
It’s more important than ever to increase your field’s productivity. The massive labor shortage that we’re all too familiar with is making it harder for jobs to get done on time and under budget. According to the Associated Builders and Contractors, the construction industry needs to attract 650,000 new workers in 2022 alone, which is a tall order. It’s also preventing many trade contractors from growing their businesses as fast as they could be.
If you combine the challenges of the labor shortage with the fact that foremen are spending an average of 8-hours per week managing materials, you’re put in a tough position to increase productivity.
That’s why hundreds of contractors across the country rely on Agora to simplify the materials procurement process for their field. With Agora, field teams spend an average of 38% less time managing materials on the job. To learn how, read on.
1. Get your field team off phone calls and out of emails
In our most recent survey of trade contractors on their procurement processes, 76% of all material requests made from the field to the office (or supplier) were made over phone or email. Even worse, 9% were made using PDF or paper forms. That's a huge time sink for your field teams.
Agora’s simple mobile solution drastically reduces the number of emails, phone calls, text messages, PDFs, and of course paper from your fields materials request process. The Amazon-like mobile app gives the field a list of materials to choose for a specific job making it easy to find what's needed. With a couple clicks, an accurate requisition is sent digitally to your office or vendor.
2. Ensure your field has the materials they need when they need them
On average, 34% of all material deliveries have an issue, whether that be incorrect materials, missing materials, back-ordered materials, damaged materials, etc. Every time a delivery arrives with an issue, your field teams are blocked. According to Levelset, two-thirds of construction businesses spend more than a quarter of their work hours waiting.
If you can prevent delivery issues, you can prevent your field team from wasting time - and time is money. By creating requisitions and purchase orders utilizing Agora’s materials catalog, material lists are organized, standardized, accurate, and to the spec. They’re easy to read and interpret, unlike phone calls, emails, and handwriting. As a result, purchase errors are removed throughout the procurement process leading to the correct materials being delivered on time.
3. Make it easy and quick for your field to log deliveries
Considering 34% of all deliveries have an issue, it’s important for your field to provide updates back to the office, however, logging deliveries takes time that could be better spent building. This creates a dilemma, do you sacrifice your office being unaware of deliveries or do you sacrifice valuable hours in the field being lost?
You don’t have to answer that if you can find a way to make it easier and quicker for your field team to notify the office. Your first step is to completely remove paper delivery slips, phone calls, and emails from the delivery notification process all together. Arm your field with Agora’s mobile app so they can scan the barcode (or snap a picture) of the materials delivered. The scan will be sent to the office in real-time. Even better, the delivery notification and image will automatically be attached to the original PO, making it easier for the office reconcile invoices.
4. Empower your field to make smarter order requests
A big reason for over or underbuying stems from your field making poor ordering decisions. It's not always the field to blame though. They're often working with limited information and lack visibility to what materials have already been purchased or released.
When you provide your field teams with real-time visibility to what’s already been ordered, what’s in the warehouse, and the quantities of those materials remaining, your field team can make smarter ordering decisions for the job.
Provide Your Field With Agora to Increase Productivity
Find time to talk with one of Agora’s procurement experts and get a free review of your current procurement process. We’ll help you identify the areas ripe for improvement, and how you can get your field teams building more and managing materials less.
